The invention relates to management of computer systems.
A collection of resources or components within a system can typically be represented as a hierarchy of objects. Such a representation can be helpful for management, for example for remote management of part or all of the system.
In a complex computer system, that may involve parts of the system being implemented on different platforms, providing efficient interfaces for the management of a potentially large amount of management information becomes difficult, especially in that the management information can relate potentially to a set of different platforms.
The provision of services at one level within the system can be dependent on the status and performance of resources at another level within the system. In the absence of effective modeling of the dependency of service availability on the underlying hardware, the impact of hardware failure predicted by the hardware model cannot be assessed proactively to re-position services ahead of any customer visible outage.
Also, in order to provision a service, knowledge of the underlying resources is needed. Management of this knowledge in an effective manner is desirable to enable efficient utilization of the system resources.
Accordingly, the invention relates to improving access to system management information in a computer system.